New Take on the Marketing Funnel

You know that the mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion is in the throes of cre­ative fer­ment and rein­ven­tion when the McK­in­sey Quar­terly pub­lishes an arti­cle call­ing for the need to rethink the mar­ket­ing fun­nel. And yes, this is two years after For­rester Research pro­posed a new take on the mar­ket­ing fun­nel and blogged about it.

What’s impor­tant here is not the two-year lag between McK­in­sey and Forrester’s respec­tive research. It’s the val­i­da­tion impact of McK­in­sey – the go-to con­sul­tancy for the world’s largest enter­prises – call­ing for mar­keters to rein­vent and over­haul core premises and mod­els about cus­tomer engage­ment, demand cre­ation, brand advo­cacy and so on. Although McK­in­sey is rarely the go-to con­sul­tancy for mar­ket­ing execs, they do carry enor­mous weight with other C-level exec­u­tives. (Which can help when the CMO is mak­ing the case to her col­leagues on the rea­sons why the com­pany needs to adopt Mar­ket­ing 2.0 models.)

If you have a pre­mium sub­scrip­tion to McK­in­sey Quar­terly, you can see their inter­ac­tive pre­sen­ta­tion of the new “con­sumer deci­sion jour­ney” model. If not, here is how McK­in­sey presents the old way of look­ing at the mar­ket­ing fun­nel and then the new con­sumer deci­sion journey.

Source: McK­in­sey Quar­terly, 2009 Num­ber 3.

Source: McK­in­sey Quar­terly, 2009 Num­ber 3.

One of the key points of McKinsey’s argu­ment is that mar­keters need to engage con­sumers at all 4 points (illus­trated here) in their deci­sion jour­ney. Each of these points is an oppor­tu­nity for brands to win or lose ground in the hearts and minds of consumers.

McKinsey’s research chal­lenges some tacit assump­tions. For example,

Con­trary to the fun­nel metaphor, the num­ber of brands under con­sid­er­a­tion dur­ing the active-evaluation phase may now actu­ally expand rather than nar­row as con­sumers seek infor­ma­tion and shop a cat­e­gory. Brands may “inter­rupt” the decision-making process by enter­ing into con­sid­er­a­tion and even force the exit of rivals. The num­ber of brands added in later stages dif­fers by industry….

Source: McK­in­sey Quar­terly, 2009 Num­ber 3.

It will be inter­est­ing to see how many large enter­prises embrace the new mod­els and frame­works of Mar­ket­ing 2.0, given McKinsey’s imprimatur.

Tagged as: engagement, marketing funnel